Has the present economic crisis brought a moment of opportunity for those who argue that Chesterton’s rejection of both state socialism and monopoly capitalism in favour of a radical decentralisation of wealth—the key argument of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, and the basis of ‘distributism’ - is as relevant to the new millennium as it ever was?
Such ideas appear now to be being taken increasingly seriously within the Conservative party, through the influence of the theologian Phillip Blond, who is director of something called ‘the progressive conservatism project’ at the think tank Demos.
Interviewed by The New Statesman, Blond was clear about his intellectual background: “I’m not a socialist and I’m an Anglican. But I have always been interested in Catholic social thought, which always made the argument that capitalism and communism are species of the same thing. Both are forms of disempowerment. But I also think that’s a Tory insight.” And, reports The New Statesman, he reveres many of the figures whom Maurice Cowling, the conservative historian and doyen of a previous generation of “intellectual Tories”, enlisted in the “Christian counter-revolution” against what he termed the “post-Christian consensus”: for example, Thomas Carlyle, G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
In the February issue of Prospect magazine, Blond expounded his ideas at some length. Here, we present a series of extracts from this article.
The current crisis, argues, Blond, ‘represents a disintegration of the idea of the “market state” and makes obsolete the political consensus of the last 30 years. A fresh analysis of the ruling ideological orthodoxy is required.’
So far, he argues, the Tories haven’t fully drawn the lesson of the crisis:
“Tory social thinking has genuinely evolved, but the party’s economic thinking is still poised between repetition and renewal. As late as August 2008 David Cameron said: “I’m going to be as radical a social reformer as Margaret Thatcher was an economic reformer,” and that “radical social reform is what this country needs right now.” He is right about society, but against the backdrop of collapsing markets and without a macro-economic alternative, Thatcherite economics has been wrongfooted by events.”
So what the Tories need now is to recover an earlier strand of their own tradition:
“It was Edmund Burke who famously spoke of conservative radicalism being founded on the little platoons of family and civic association. ‘To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind’.”
“Thatcherite neoliberalism was determined to terminate all these state monopolies. Instead, markets would become the vehicle by which efficiency was maximised and prosperity attained. But the free market fundamentalists often did little more than create new monopolies of capital to replace those of the state.”
We are now very close, in Blond’s ideas, to what Chesterton’s analysis of our situation would surely be. The Capitalist free market monopoly economic model whose crisis we are now living through has proved to be no alternative to socialism: as Chesterton puts it in The Outline of Sanity, “Monopoly is neither private nor enterprising. It exists to prevent private enterprise. And that system of trust or monopoly, that complete destruction of property, would still be the present goal of all our progress, if there were not a Bolshevist in the world.” This kind of thinking appears to be behind Blond’s prescription for a new conservatism:
“What must Cameron’s priorities be, and how can he begin to build a new communitarian Tory settlement? He could start with four tasks: relocalising our banking system, developing local capital, helping normal people gain new assets and breaking up big business monopolies.”
Or as Chesterton puts it, “the cure for centralization
is decentralization….when capital has come to be too much in the hand of the few, the right thing is to restore it into the hands of the many.” This key Chestertonian principal is the basis of Blond’s perception of where a post-Thatcherite conservatism should go:
“The next step for conservatism is to reverse the old politics of class, by restoring capital to labour. Cameron should reject the Marxist narrative that paints Tories as wedded to a disenfranchised proletariat. On the contrary: conservatives believe in the extension of wealth and prosperity to all. Yet the great disaster of the last 30 years is the destruction of the capital, assets and savings of the poor: in Britain, the share of wealth (excluding property) enjoyed by the bottom 50 per cent of the population fell from 12 per cent in 1976 to just 1 per cent in 2003. A radical communitarian civic conservatism must be committed to reversing this trend.”
Blond openly identifies this strand of the Tory tradition with Chesterton’s and Belloc’s distributism:
“Such ideas are not without a past. The idea of a Tory distributist state is not new; indeed the phrase “property owning democracy” was first coined in 1923 by the Conservative MP Noel Skelton. Anthony Eden used it too in his celebrated speech to the 1946 party conference, and the philosophy enthused both Churchill and Thatcher. Recent Tory proposals to exempt the savings of the low paid and pensioners from tax are exactly the path to follow.”
Blond assails the monopoly of the great supermarkets, which has destroyed the small independent trader:
“The Tories must take on the unrecognised private sector monopolies that hide on every British high street. According to figures from IGD research in May 2008, the British grocery market was worth £134.8bn. Of this, the big four supermarkets took £98.6bn, a 73 per cent market share. In the name of competition we have happily handed over our high streets to Tesco, strangling local commerce. The more that price is our only measure of competition, the bigger the economies of scale required to compete, and the higher the barriers to entry for small local competitors. Our fishmongers, butchers, and bakers are driven out—converting a whole class of owner occupiers into low wage earners, employed by supermarkets”.
The Tories, Blond says, should
“….build a new economic and capital base that decentralises power and extends wealth and also makes a final break with the logic of monopoly and debt-financed capitalism. In doing so, Cameron can finally bring together the Tory tradition of Disraeli’s reform of capitalism with his own entirely justified desire to be a “social radical.” It would render the left superfluous and redefine Marx as just another dispossessor of the poor. Moreover it would recover the insights of 19th-century conservatives like Cobbett, Ruskin and Carlyle, ally them with Tawney and the distributism of Chesterton, Belloc and Skelton—all of who knew that, without something to trade, one cannot enter a market. Making markets truly free prevents corporate domination, but also extends ownership, prosperity and innovation across the whole of society. The task of recapitalising the poor is, therefore, the task of making the market work for the many, not the few. David Cameron doesn’t need to do any of this to win the next election. But, to be a great prime minister, he does.”
Where Tawney comes in here is not explained; but Tawney apart, the basis of Blond’s ideas is clear enough. If he really has achieved a serious influence over the thinking of the man who will almost certainly become Prime Minister sometime next year, Chesterton could be on the political agenda in this country as he has never been before.
–William Oddie